Distributed Sketch Deployment for Software Switches

Network measurement is critical for various network applications, but scaling measurement techniques to the network-wide level is challenging for existing sketch-based solutions. In software switches, centralized deployment provides low resource usage but suffers from poor load balancing. In contrast, collaborative measurement achieves load balancing through flow distribution across software switches but requires high resource usage. This paper presents a novel distributed deployment framework that overcomes the limitations above. First, our framework is lightweight such that it splits sketches into segments and allocates them across forwarding paths to minimize resource usage and achieve load balancing. This also enables per-packet load balancing by distributing computations across software switches. Second, through a novel collaborative strategy, our framework achieves finer-grained flow distribution and further optimizes load balancing. Third, we further optimize load balancing by eliminating the mutual influence among forwarding paths. We evaluate the proposed framework on various network topologies and different sketches. Results indicate our solution matches the load balancing of collaborative measurement while approaching the low resource usage of centralized deployment. Moreover, it achieves superior performance in per-packet load balancing, which is not considered in previous deployment solutions.